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 this exodus with favour; all of them profited by the peopling of the Three Eastern Provinces, although their interests in the movement were not always identical.

Emigrants, once settled in Manchuria, maintain their relations with their province of origin in China proper. This is best shown by a study of the remittances that the emigrants sent back to their families in the villages of their birth. It is impossible to estimate the total of these remittances, which are effected through banks, through the post and through money taken back by returning emigrants. It is believed that twenty million dollars are so taken annually into Shantung and Hopei, while the Post Office statistics showed in 1928 that the Provinces of Liaoning and Kirin remitted to the Province of Shantung by money orders a sum equal to the amount remitted to that province by all the other provinces in China. There is no doubt that these remittances form an important economic link between Manchuria and China proper. They are the index of the contact maintained between the emigrants and their families in the provinces of their origin. This contact is all the easier because conditions on either side of the Great Wall do not greatly differ. The produce of the soil is in the main the same and the agricultural methods identical. The most pronounced variation between agricultural conditions in Manchuria and in Shantung are caused by differences of climate, varying density of population and different states of economic development. These factors do not prevent the agriculture of the Three Eastern Provinces from tending to resemble more and more the agricultural conditions in Shantung. In Liaoning, a long-settled territory, rural conditions resemble more closely those in Shantung than do those in Heilungkiang, a territory more recently opened up.

The organisation of direct trade with the agriculturists in Manchuria resembles also the conditions in China proper. In the Three Provinces, such commerce is in the hands of Chinese, who alone buy directly from the farmers. Similarly, in the Three Provinces, as in China proper, credit performs an important function in such local trade. One can even say that the resemblance in commercial organisation in Manchuria and China proper is found not only in local countryside trade, but also in trade in the towns.

In fact, the social and economic Chinese organisation in Manchuria is a transplanted society which has kept the customs, dialect and activities of its home. The only changes necessary are those required to meet the conditions of a land more vast, less inhabited and more open to outside influences.

The question arises whether this mass migration has been merely an episode or whether it will continue in the future. When account is taken of the areas in South Manchuria and certain valleys in the south and east, such as the Sungari, Liao and Mutan Valleys, it is clear that, from the purely agricultural point of view, Manchuria can still absorb numerous colonists. According to one of the best experts on the staff of the Chinese Eastern Railway, the population of Manchuria could reach in forty years a figure of 75,000,000.

But economic conditions may in the future limit the rapid growth of the population of Manchuria. Economic conditions in fact alone render the future of soya-bean farming uncertain. On the other hand, crops recently introduced into Manchuria, especially rice-farming, may develop there. The hopes which some Japanese have placed in the development of cotton-growing seem to be subject to certain limitations. Consequently, economic and technical factors may to some extent limit the entry of newcomers into the Three Provinces.

The recent political events are not the only cause of the decline of Chinese migration into Manchuria. The economic crisis had already, in the first six months of the year 1931, diminished the importance of the seasonal migration. The world depression added to the effect of an unavoidable